A new study published by the Regional Science and Urban Economics journal reveals the degree to which social inequality and poverty determine the likelihood of being killed by a tornado.The study, titled “Double danger in the double wide: Dimensions of poverty, housing quality and tornado impacts,” is written by Michigan State University academics Jungmin Lim, Scott Loveridge, Robert Shupp and Mark Skidmore.It was published in April, as tornado season begins in the United States. Last weekend, tornadoes and floods left at least 15 dead, including many children, across impoverished parts of East Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, and Tennessee.The number of people crushed to death or swept up and killed by tornadoes is staggering. Between 1980 and 2014, 2,718 people were killed and 39,635 injured by tornadoes in the world’s wealthiest country. In a three-day period in April 2011, 351 tornadoes killed 316 people.The study’s authors explain, “While it is clear that some places are simply more prone to tornadoes due to climatic reasons, this does not fully explain the difference in fatalities across the region.”The report notes that “poor people tend to cluster in high tornado risk areas” across the Midwest and South. For the most part, the wealthiest Americans live in major coastal cities where tornadoes do not occur. Those who remain in “tornado alley” do so in part because the risk of tornado is factored into the lower cost of living. A 2016 study revealed that half of Americans cannot afford the cost of a $400 emergency expense like travel, hotel and meal expenses during a storm evacuation.But this “does not fully explain the differences in fatalities across the regions,” the study says, because “the areas with relatively high tornado fatalities do not necessarily match up with the areas with the highest tornado intensities.” The study’s conclusion is that areas with higher poverty and inequality are more vulnerable to deaths during tornadoes due to a large number of people living in mobile homes and a lack of infrastructure and government programs.Poor and working class residents of tornado-prone areas are less likely to evacuate in the face of tornado warnings, “mostly due to constraints placed by a lack of transportation and affordable refuge options,” the study’s authors write, citing an earlier study. In addition, even if families had money saved to evacuate, many workers simply cannot afford to take time off work, even to escape a tornado.

I have only been in one serious tornado warning/watch (whichever is more severe, I always forget which one it is). I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

And we went to this safe room in the hotel.

And I could see how poverty could effect you because where do you go?

Do you want to get out in the tornado?

No.

So you're not going to travel far.

And for some people that's all they have -- support in a distance.

And imagine, you're in a trailer or even a wooden house on pier & beam.

POLITICO'S Mark Perry reports
that Barack is planning to start the battle to retake Mosul in early
October and, "If Mosul is retaken, it would both mark a major political
triumph for
Barack Obama and likely benefit his party’s nominee at the polls,
Hillary Clinton, undercutting Republican claims that the Obama
administration has failed to take off the gloves against the Islamic
State."

Mosul was seized by the Islamic State in June of 2014.

Barack's 'answer' since August of 2014 has been to drop bombs on Iraq daily.

That was the plan.

Of course, Iraq's Prime Minister Hayder al-Abadi couldn't pull it together enough to even get it started in early October.

Even if he had, the notion that Mosul could be retaken in a matter of
weeks shows just how out of touch the Iraqi government and the White
House was with reality on the ground in Iraq.

QUESTION: Okay. Can we stay on [the Islamic State] and the battle of Mosul?MR KIRBY: Sure, sure.QUESTION: Okay. Is it turning out to be like a slog, or how are things moving? How are they progressing?QUESTION: No!MR KIRBY: Elise, do you want to come take the podium?QUESTION: Not today.

Elise's little outburst shocked even then-spokesperson John Kirby.

But that's how the western media has played it -- denial, denial and more denial.

Yesterday, the US Defense Dept announced:

Strikes in IraqIn Iraq, coalition military forces conducted four strikes consisting of 39 engagements against ISIS targets:-- Near Mosul, four strikes engaged three ISIS tactical units
and a sniper team; destroyed two fighting positions, two artillery
systems, a heavy machine gun, a medium machine gun, and an ISIS staging
area; and suppressed nine mortar teams.Additionally, three strikes were conducted in Iraq on May 1 that closed within the last 24 hours:

-- Near Mosul, May 1, three strikes destroyed three vehicle
bombs and three ISIS fuel tankers, and suppressed three mortar teams.

Witnesses and survivors of the US strike say the whole US story about ISIS putting them in the homes never happened.Rather, they insist airstrikes had been leveling houses in the area
for days, and ultimately everybody ended up collected into just three
houses close together, hundreds of people from scores of families, when
major US airstrikes came and brought the buildings down on top of them.Indeed, the whole reason the houses had been so popular with fleeing
civilians is that they were relatively far away from the fighting, and
they assumed there’d be no reason for them to be attacked, since they
were small and isolated. The Pentagon has yet to respond to the
eyewitness accounts, which radically differ from their own version of
events.

Iraq’s Foreign Minister this week asked
the United States to develop a financial plan for the reconstruction of
the country after ISIS, similar to a program developed for Western
Europe after the Second World War.In discussions with Special Presidential Envoy to the Coalition Brett
McGurk, Ibrahim al-Jaafari stressed the need for “collective support
from the international community to contribute to the reconstruction of
infrastructure after the defeat of terrorism.” Jaafari suggested “the
adoption of a project similar to the Marshall Plan which contributed to
rebuilding Germany after the Second World War.”Iraq will need billions of dollars to rebuild after ISIS. Large
portions of major cities were destroyed in the war, infrastructure was
neglected under ISIS, villages are riddled with mines and booby-traps.
The deputy governor of Anbar estimated that his province would need $22
billion alone for reconstruction.Um, never mind invoking the Marshall Plan. What needs to be cited
here is that the United States already spent billions to reconstruct
Iraq, from 2003-2010. I know. I was there. It was my job to help spend
some of those billions. We accomplished less than nothing. In fact, our
failure to reconstruct Iraq then lead in a direct line to the Iraq of
now. I cannot believe I am writing this. Again.